teacup 2003

Robert Lazzarini made this teacup – well, sort of – out of porcelain and stainless steel. It's like your grandma's tea set went through a funhouse mirror. What's interesting to me is how Lazzarini takes something so familiar, so domestic, and stretches it, warps it, challenging our perception. The blue flowers, they're still there, but the form is fluid. The shiny spoon looks like it's melting. There's a tension between the expected and the unexpected. It makes you consider how we take for granted the shapes of the objects around us, and how much they shape our understanding of the world. It reminds me of the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, who also loved to play with melting forms. It's like Lazzarini is asking us to reconsider the very act of seeing, and the assumptions we bring to it.